The Niagara News is the community newspaper of Niagara College located in Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It is created and produced by the students of the Niagara College Journalism program.

Residential school survivors honoured

One little girl’s story helped create a day to commemorate the dark legacy of residential schools in Canada.

It was 1973 and a young girl, Phyllis Webstad, was starting her first day at a new school in her brand-new orange shirt.

In a moment that has come to represent something larger, the staff at the St. Joseph Mission residential school took away all her clothes, including her new shirt.

“The colour orange has always reminded me of that and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how I felt like I was worth nothing,” explains Webstad on the website of the Orange Shirt Day Society.

This year, Indigenous Education at Niagara College invited the entire college to participate in Orange Shirt Day on Sept. 30.

First held in 2013 and stemming from Webstad’s experience, Orange Shirt Day is an opportunity for people across the country to wear orange as a way of honouring residential school survivors and remembering those who didn’t.

Jamie Warren, an indigenous student counsellor at Niagara College, says the event and the group photo are designed to show solidarity within the community and remember the past.

“By taking this photo, we want to say, ‘We share our support for residential school survivors,’ and, by wearing orange, we’re remembering those who didn’t survive,” Warren adds.

The federal government estimates that 150,000 First Nation, Inuit and Métis children attended residential schools where many experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Originally started in the mid-1800s, the last residential school closed in 1996.

In 2008, the federal government issued a public apology and established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which released its final report in 2015. While now a thing of the past, the impact residential schools had on indigenous people and the country as a whole is still being felt.

“There is a teaching about this,” says Warren, “that for every decision a person, a community makes, it will continue to affect seven generations.”

Warren continued: “If you put that in the context of residential schools, if this was just happening three or four generations ago, we still have three or four generations of healing left to do.”

The idea of intergenerational trauma is simple enough on paper; like the butterfly effect gone mad, trauma and abuse trickles down and continues to be felt across generations.

“A lot of these children spent their entire childhood in these schools and they never learned to be a parent because they were abused themselves as children. When they grow up to be parents themselves, they don’t know how to parent and they also pass on the trauma that they carried with them,” explains Warren.

While it is a national issue, it also has local implications. Here at Niagara College, 311 students self-identify as indigenous and the real number is likely higher. The Mohawk Institute residential school was in Brantford and was the closest to the Niagara region.

Although Orange Shirt Day has passed, it isn’t too late to get involved. Simply take a selfie wearing orange clothing and tweet @IndigenousEdNC with the hashtag #EveryChildMatters or #OrangeShirtDay. All of the photos will be added to the collage of images from the college sent to the Orange Shirt Day Society.